With the publication of The Scottish Clearances, T M Devine’s highly acclaimed Scottish history trilogy becomes a quartet. In this new book, he turns his forensic eye to one of the more contentious and resonant themes in modern Scottish historical studies: the clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, which saw the large-scale eviction of poor subsistence farmers by landowners eager to put the land on which they lived to more profitable use.

The three previous volumes in Devine’s series, The Scottish Nation (1999), Scotland’s Empire (2003) and To the Ends of the Earth (2011), have offered scholarly yet tremendously accessible explorations of Scotland’s past. Their readership includes a global audience of diasporic Scots, who have a voracious appetite for the